Bugle 4116 - The Experiment is Complete

The Bugle, audio newspaper for a visual world.

Hello, buglers, and welcome to the last ever bugle before my summer holiday.

There will be further bugles after.

I'm Andy Zoltzmann and we are here in London, where I'm emphatically not going to be from Monday for two weeks as I decompress from my ludicrous summer of excessive cricket watching.

London still, to update you from last week, still awaiting liberation, airdrops, anything from the international community as our democracy has been ripped from us.

Come on, what the f ⁇ could Berlin have that we don't?

At least we're still Cricket World Cup champions, as always that.

I'm joined today from all corners of the earth.

Well, Australia and the USA, which covers most corners of the earth, I think.

Firstly, here in the studio, yet another Australian comedian who is coming over here doing their own job, entertaining our women and children.

It is Tom Ballard.

Why aren't I entertaining the men?

Well, I mean, that's always the complaint, isn't it?

Coming over here, taking our stealing our women, children, jobs, potatoes, whatever it is.

Stealing our children?

I don't know.

I'll figure it out.

I'm a bit out of the loop.

I'm going to hit your racist track.

I'm getting ready for Boris's Britain.

It doesn't matter what you say.

It's all about the tone you say it.

A pleasure to be here in this shitty country, Eddie.

Thank you for having me.

It's a pleasure.

Welcome back.

How's Australia been?

Oh, just loving it, too.

We had an election this year, I'm sure it was covered on the show, in which we had a chance to make things marginally better, and we said no thanks.

No thanks.

So it's lovely to be here where you guys have really leaned into that.

Yes, a dance as old as democracy itself.

The self-hating tango of politics.

And joining us from the west coast of the USA, San Francisco, is the man who is half intergovernmental military alliance, half crucial part of a golf course.

It's NATO Green.

Hello, Andy.

Hello, buglers.

Glad to be back with you.

Great, great to have you, Nato.

You are,

I mean, we're already deep into the afternoon here in London, early morning in San Francisco.

How's today been so far over there?

So far, it's amazing.

I woke up.

I made a pot of coffee.

I'm tooling around in the house in my Star Wars pajamas.

I'm glad you finally got a break from cricket, Andy.

I have a question, though.

All right, okay, good.

Can you tell me why is cricket called cricket?

Oh, you can't ask questions like that.

I mean, it just is.

You know, that's just the way that the fates decided it.

I'm not sure.

I think it's something I assume.

I've always assumed it's something onomatopoeic.

A ball hitting a bat.

and the echo off.

And it makes that noise hitching.

Cricket.

Cricket.

Yep.

God.

You sound disgusted by that that story is as boring as the game itself personally i don't really understand sports i don't follow sports i i prefer to derive my sense of self-worth from my own achievements um

i don't need to watch anyone else's physical attainment to justify my my heavy drinking i do like the experience of being a fan though uh i root i root for one team and it's the global working class who i believe just took all the wickets in puerto rico

well you know that's the joy of of sport, isn't it?

It's good to support an underdog.

I mean, they're on a bit of a losing run, they're working too.

They've had a rough season, that one.

Well, they've had a rough start for the millennium.

I think I'll be, was it eight or ten millenniums in a row that they've really struggled to get out of the blocks early?

This is the one, I think.

I know, but next time, man.

Next time.

This is our year.

I'm actually in the UK on a working visa, and that visa allows me to do any work that complies with British or EU regulations, except a professional sports person or sports coach.

Got it.

That was going to be my fallback.

If comedy didn't work for me, I was going to coach Scunthorpe United.

That's the one sport joke I have, everyone.

Right.

You know, that can be a gateway, Tom.

To you embracing the true way.

We are recording on the 26th of July on this date in 1745 as the first recorded women's cricket match.

And just 254 short years later, the MCC allowed women in the pavilion at Lourdes.

Who says you can't hurry progress?

This is Bugle 4116 for the week beginning Monday, the 29th of July.

On this day in the year 238, in Rome, the two emperors,

they had two emperors at the same time, it was the year of the sixth emperors, 238.

That's a lot of emperors to get through in a year.

Pupianus, that is his correct name, and Balbinus.

Come on.

Were, well, dragged through the streets and executed.

That's got to be a disappointing day when you're an emperor.

I mean, how do you take the positives out of that in a press conference after it?

You know, something to take away and build on.

It's a bad, it's a bad day.

And they were replaced to really add insult to fatal injury by a 13-year-old.

I guess, you know, if you're good enough, you're old enough.

Gordian III, proclaimed emperor.

Youngest, sole legal Roman emperor.

What a terrific, terrific effort from the young lad.

They got through six emperors in the year 238.

That's a high rate of turnover for emperors.

But I mean, would that...

You know, we've just gotten to our second prime minister of the year.

And frankly, if I could be promised that by the end of the year, we'd have had six, I would be absolutely fing delighted.

Emperor is like the gig economy.

It's like driving for Uber.

Well, to be honest, it was pretty much like that in ancient Rome in the third century.

They got through.

I remember talking about this on the Bugle years ago.

They got through something like 30 emperors in about 70 years, and only two of them died of natural causes.

That is the way to do politics.

Don't let anyone settle and get comfortable.

And his views do not reflect those of other guests on the podcast who may or may not be here at a working visa and could be deported for merely suggesting the idea that a certain prime minister should be in any way executed like a Roman emperor.

I'm not saying they should be executed.

I'm just saying short terms of office could be the way to go forward.

The Praetorian Guard, no less, stormed the palace and captured Pupianus and Balbinus, the two emperors, dragged them through the streets of Rome and executed them.

Actually, I cannot accept that that is his name.

Spell it for me.

P-U-P-I-E-N-U-S.

Did you say the other guy is named Balpinas?

He's heading that way.

Anyway, no wonder they were,

you know, just to bring some dignity back to the office of Emperor, they were executed and replaced by a 13-year-old.

That is a bad day.

Bad day as an emperor.

If you think you've had a bad day today, it was not as bad as Pupianus on the 29th of July.

Did the 13-year-old name Pupianus?

You just, and by that stage, Rome had pretty much clocked off in terms of making any sense.

Yeah, Yeah, they're done.

Yeah.

A section in the bin this week?

There is no section in the bin this week due to time constraints.

Stroke, me waking up late.

Last bugle before holiday.

I've never seen that in actual paper.

Just a section blank going, nah, I was a bit tired.

Holiday's on Monday.

Well, I mean,

newspapers

should do that.

They should be shorter.

I mean, does anyone really need a fashion section?

Are there not enough different clothes in the world already?

There are definitely enough recipes in the world.

Sure.

And enough, you know, looking at other people's houses.

Just leave it blank.

Let people colour it in.

Write your own news.

Every newspaper now should have a fake news page that is just left blank.

Leave a space for a headline.

You can draw a little cartoon and just write your own news.

Make the world better for yourself.

Top story this week.

The experiment is complete.

Two twin embryos developed in a Soviet lab sometime in the 1940s, secretly infiltrated into the USA and the UK, are now president and prime minister, respectively.

We did it, everyone!

Tasked with fulfilling the dreams of their supporters and power humping their countries back to a mythical Elysian past that never even came close to truly existing.

Tom, you've come to Britain at an interesting time in our democratic history, for want of two better words.

Obviously, democracy has always been a little bit of a sham, but a big bit of a sham, but now the shams are at least a bareface balls to sham it up shamily with quite brazen sham shamelessness.

shamelessness in a way maybe we should just appreciate their openness and honesty no more pretense just to flat out no questions answered cards under the table balls in the whiskey glass travesty um

so i mean tom as a as a as an outsider i mean you are used to changing prime ministers sure in australia on an almost weekly basis we love it over there um from one inadequate to the next um

and uh i mean i think what's surprised most people is having gone from various inadequates to the next the extent to which we've gone even more inadequate with Boris Johnson.

As a representative of the global community,

what is the outsider's view of our unelected?

I actually, I think it's a beautiful story.

I think it sends a wonderful message.

You're going to have to flesh out your working out.

Well, I'm just saying to all the children out there across the UK, it just says that no matter who you are or where you're from,

you're fed because Boris Johnson is the Prime Minister.

That's inspiring.

At last, equality.

Equality.

You call him Bojo.

This is good, actually.

Here's Boris Johnson.

He's Bojo.

We have Scott Morrison in Australia.

We call him Scomo.

Donald Trump is the president, and we call him Bracist.

And a stupid fucking head who's stupid in the head and is f and is dumb and shit and bad.

So it's actually funny how we all sort of line up that way.

Interesting.

It's all the stars aligning.

NATO from America.

I mean, is Boris Johnson the sort of

the Trump you could have had?

The still,

but slightly less than

your own version.

He was born in America.

Yeah.

Yes.

Oh,

that is a bullet we really could have dodged.

Don't blame us for this.

This is your problem.

Leave us out of it.

I'm not usually trying to be so petty, but Boris Johnson is uncommonly ugly.

Like, if a casting director put out a casting call for an unattractive British person and he showed up, they'd say, no, that's too on the nose.

I said I wanted wanted an ugly British person, so like this, but less so.

So that's mostly what we think about when we see Boris Johnson.

Boris Johnson looks like if you shot Donald Trump out of a cannon.

I mean, how many times have you dreamed of that happening?

It was a huge day, the whole sort of transition.

I don't know if you saw Teresa May giving her final address outside of Downing Street.

A protester yelled out, stop Brexit.

And May said, I think the answer to that is, I think not.

Which was actually recorded as the most vicious and devastating burn in British political history.

Oscar Wilde's ghost heard that and said, bit harsh.

Yep.

And his speech was very, uh, was very inspiring, I thought.

He said, Our job is to deliver Brexit by October 31st.

I just love that people are still using the term deliver in reference to Brexit.

That kind of implies that it's like a delicious pizza that people have ordered and just can't wait for it.

It's a shit pizza, Boris.

You're not delivering.

You will inflict the pizza.

you will unleash the brexit pizza you will defecate the pizza you will be the harbinger of brexit i think right i mean i always saw it more as some kind of freakish alien baby that has now been gestating for three years and god knows what the f is going to emerge when it is finally delivered boris uh boris johnson's uh in his inaugural uh speech promised to give britain the leadership it deserves i i i thought there's Moe was already doing that.

We deserve it even worse than that.

I know we've been naughty, but not surely not that bad.

He said, Thank you all for the incredible honor you have done me to the 90,000 people who've elected him.

He said, the time for campaigning is over

and the time for work begins.

I mean, bear in mind, he has been Foreign Secretary.

Only now

does work begin.

The work to unite our country

and party, deliver Brexit and defeat Corbyn.

So he wants to unite the country and deliver Brexit.

Those two are not compatible things.

No.

Indeed, as I've said many times before,

I'm not sure Britain has ever been united, and that it has in common with essentially every other country that has ever existed, will ever exist, or currently exists.

They aren't united, are they?

How united is Australia?

We were united at the Olympics for about a day.

I think you guys were united on the Bodhi McBoat base thing.

I think that was the moment when you all came together and enjoyed that.

Yeah, actually the London Olympics.

I mean, apart from the resentment that it was all happening in London from other parts of the country,

everything happens in London.

The government's De Boris Johnson just announced that he's just going to build a new high-speed rail link.

It's just going to go round and round London.

24-hour train, just going absolutely nowhere and ending up back in King's Cross.

NATO, I mean, how ha America, of course, is famous for the

unwritten ironic quote marks around the united of its name.

Do you look at Britain now and think that we're challenging you for most inappropriate use of the word united in the title of a country?

Yeah, whenever people say that they want to unite the country, I always think,

do I want that?

There are some people I really don't want to be united with.

I mean, I don't know if this story's made it across the water, but I would rather not be part of a united country with, say, Jeffrey Epstein, noted billionaire and child rapist.

Like, can we leave him out of the unity?

You know, if there's any, if there's ever any political event diagram where Jeffrey Epstein and me are in the same thing, then something has gone horribly wrong.

So I actually think that United should not be a goal of politics.

I think defeat of evil should be the goal.

Perhaps justice.

I would take justice, competence would be nice.

Not unity.

He said that his job is to deliver Brexit by October 31st, but then he also said by 2050, it is more than possible that the United Kingdom will be the greatest and most prosperous economy in Europe.

So apparently by 2050, the UK will go back in in what I assume will be a rebrentry.

He's very optimistic.

He said that by 2050, the UK is going to become the greatest place on earth.

Now, unfortunately, by 2050, that's going to be very low bar.

Like, most of the earth will be underwater, on fire, covered in the carcasses of dead bees.

And no doubt, America will still be suffering under the fourth term of a Jeffrey Epstein presidency, NATO.

So

that can be an issue.

I read Boris Johnson said he was going to take the UK out of the EU by October, quote, do or die.

That sounds like a good basis for a second referendum.

Whether Boris Johnson should do or die, I think there would be probably a landslide vote if people had the option of voting for Boris Johnson to die.

Well, God respect the word of other people.

His cabinet

has recently announced them and he culled pretty much everyone in the the cabinet, which usually you wouldn't be that upset about, other than what they've been replaced with.

It's very much a cabinet.

Well, essentially, it's a who's who of who shouldn't be who.

Dominic Raab back, didn't know Dove was an important port.

Jacob Rees-Mogg is now

a cabinet.

How do I explain this?

He's barely even a one-dimensional caricature.

I have to sit my children down and say, yeah, this, you know, I've told you it's important to live in a democratic, free society.

Then that, and now this.

It's very difficult for me.

Are those glasses he's wearing, or are they two separate monocles that have just slowly fused together with the power of inbreeding?

Is that how he's come around?

It was a big reshuffle.

Half the cabinet went.

A Conservative MP Nigel Evans described the change as a Summer's Day massacre, which, you know, if you're going to have a massacre.

Sun's out, guns out.

Yeah.

It's nice, isn't it?

Pretty Patel is the home secretary.

What do you think of her?

Well,

I mean, she's clearly very good at multitasking, as she's been being paid a ridiculous amount of money for doing odd jobs on the side.

How much fing free time do you have?

Boris Johnson, despite appointing this cabinet of flounderingly incompetent toadies and barely hinged fantasists, and with the Brexit masterminding democracy manipulating Ubescheister Dominic Cummins, pulling the strings behind the harrowing scenes, in accordance with the democratic will of the people, of course, Boris Johnson has surprisingly pledged that this heralds the start of a new golden age for Britain.

A new British golden age, which one assumes has made the rest of the world think, you reckon we're going to fall for that shit again?

No fing chance, unless you've created an even better sport than cricket, which of course is philosophically impossible.

Some people are very excited about Boris getting the top job, including collect, columnist, and extremely popular friend magnet Toby Young.

Did you see this?

Oh, I missed this, actually.

You've written a profile about Boris Johnson, recalling when he, Toby, first met him at Oxford, and he found him to be, quote fizzing with vim and vinegar, bursting with spunk, as he once put it, explaining why he needs so many different female partners.

Bursting with spunk was your first Edinburgh show.

Is that right, Andy?

Or is that rupturing with Jism?

I always get them confused.

I forget which one was which.

Well, I mean, I did two shows that year.

Toby Young also described Boris as a cross between Hugh Grant and a silverback gorilla.

Richard Curtis, do not write that film.

Put the pen down.

Bursting with spunk, Andy.

Well, I mean, that's good because there was talk of a sperm shortage actually after Brexit.

Right, well, here we stopped that, I guess.

We won't be able to import all the Danish sperm that has been supplying our IVF clinics.

Andy, I have spent literally months trying to work out a joke about Brexit and the problem of the Irish backstop and neatly connecting both to the expression the Irish goodbye,

which if you don't know, refers to leaving a party without saying goodbye.

In other words, the exact opposite of Brexit, which is an interminable and public embarrassment of a goodbye, and the irony of an expression about leaving a people oppressed by Britain, representing the opposite of the British politics of leaving, but the joke itself collapsed under the absurdity of its own contradictions.

And I keep hoping the EU will put me out of my misery.

Set up punchline.

First rule of comedy.

NATO,

obviously we're not the only democratic country in the world.

You and America, of course, are greatest democracy in the world, trademark.

And gearing up for a presidential election next year, obviously the prospect of a second term for Donald Trump is deeply unappealing for approximately 7 billion people in the world.

Is there anyone who can stop him?

You've been looking at the democratic primaries for us as the Bugle American politics correspondent.

yes,

there are some people who think that they can stop him.

In fact, about 25 of them.

There are, at this point, more Democrats running for president than there are Marvel movies,

which is too many.

In fact, there are so many Democrats who are just white guys whose names I can't remember.

If there were the seven dwarves of boring white guy Democratic presidential candidates, like you, you know how you always forget one?

Like there's grumpy, sleepy, bashful, happy, de Blasio, Biden, and Doc.

Everyone always forgets de Blasio.

And so, and then, like, if you remember the part of the movie, The Seven Dwarves, Biden is the one who keeps rubbing Snow White's shoulders when she did not ask him to.

So, and I was trying to figure out: like, are any of these people even popular?

So, The Economist just did a poll, and 11 of these people are polling at zero.

11 of them.

Do you realize how hard it is to poll at zero?

Particularly when the margin of error is plus or minus 2%.

It means that you could be at negative 2%.

And you're in England, and Tom, you're not from Australia.

There's no reason that you even need to be aware of the name of the former congressman from Montgomery County, Maryland, who's running for president.

It's John Delaney, but it doesn't matter.

He's polling at 0.6%,

0.6%.

And to give you a sense of how low that is, in the very same poll, 2% of Americans said that they see France as an enemy.

So

France, France.

These are people who think that their stinky cheeses are a threat to the American way of life.

So if 2% of Americans say that they see France as an enemy, it means that 2% of Americans are just crazy and confused and will say anything.

So if John Delaney is polling at 0.6%,

it means that even people who believe that aliens live among us and are on the U.S.

Supreme Court are like, nah, Delaney is too sketchy for me.

That's too far.

I'm going to go hang out with these aliens.

So, and what you see

in the Democratic Party, you see some ideological divisions between the center and the left, right?

The left says we need to open our borders to anybody who needs to come here to be a refugee.

People should have a path to citizenship.

We shouldn't have this horrific corruption and deportation apparatus where families are are separated and people are put in concentration camps.

That's wrong.

And the center thinks we should do a study of that.

So Joe Biden is leading in the polls, but he continues to face protest and criticism based on his record of support over decades for segregationists, deportations, and mass incarceration.

He says criticism of his cozy relationship with racists and segregationists is misplaced because in his words, quote, no one has done more for civil rights than me.

I'm going to go out on a limb and say that doing more would have involved doing less for segregationists.

Like there must be someone who's done the exact same for civil rights as Joe Biden, but who didn't also enthusiastically champion locking up millions of black people.

Joe Biden is the candidate for you if you don't believe in judging a political candidate based on what they have said and done, but instead based on their intentions, the proclaimed goodness in their heart, and their ability to tell a down-home folksy homily.

That's Joe Biden.

Senator Kamala Harris, my senator from California, I live in San Francisco.

She was district attorney in my city.

She's brilliant and capable.

She would be an excellent and eloquent manager of America as a planet-destroying capitalist empire.

She would be the most competent manager of that.

She's the candidate for you.

If you read about stuff that the Republicans do and say things like, this is not who we are.

This is not us as a people because you've never met a person from El Salvador or heard a Native American person.

It most definitely is us.

It's so us that that's what the U.S.

and USA stands for, is that it is us.

Us is us assholes.

That's USA.

Then one of the other top five is Pete Budigeg.

He is the candidate for you if you want a candidate who is as willing to sacrifice any moral principle as a Joe Biden or Kamala Harris, but someone who is less good at it.

If you

want a politician to be like a TED Talk where all you have to do is say, huh, I never thought of that as you drive your Tesla to a steakhouse while wishing that your city was not filled with homeless encampments, but think that the principal victims of homelessness are not homeless people, but middle-class people who have to see homeless people because they smell bad.

One of them.

I'm sorry, I forgot.

You gotta mention that.

Here's the thing about being from San Francisco is that like no one in San Francisco, like San Francisco is, you know, famously the gay capital.

And so people in San Francisco are just sort of over the idea of

like it being a significant breakthrough to have the first gay president.

Because in San Francisco, like most people have already been evicted by a gay person.

Like gay people are just fully integrated into the establishment here.

So

there's no further achievement to make.

The last one I wanted to talk to you about is Bernie Sanders.

Bernie Sanders supporters are delightfully sentimental.

They support wonderful democratic socialist policies like government-run healthcare, free college, and they want to pay for the expansion of such policies by taxing the 1%.

They believe that our system is rigged to prevent those policies by a billionaire class that has corrupted democracy to serve its own interest, and that the way to defeat a corrupt system rigged by the rich is to boo at it.

As Margaret Mead said, never underestimate the power of a small group of determined, thoughtful people with nut allergies booing at something to change the world.

Indeed, it's the only thing that ever has.

Now, they support universal health care and free college education because the cost of those things are increasing faster than wages.

Well, for instance, the cost of food, clothing, cars, and electronics are not increasing faster than wages, which is why there's growing public support for Medicare for all in free college, but not, for instance, support for universal seersucker suits and single-payer Bose-Bluetooth noise-canceling headphones, which I also support.

And Bernie Sanders supporters are very enthusiastic about their candidate.

And I, as I'm a Jew, I understand why people would get so excited about a balding socialist Jewish man in his 70s.

I think my dad is pretty great too.

But I'm just used to him, so it doesn't get me wound up to be around a balding Jewish socialist man in his 70s.

My dad would also be a good president as long as Air Force One maintains a steady supply of hard pretzels.

I smell another golden age, Andy.

Well, I'm going to vote for all of them as often as possible in next year's election.

Excitingly, it appears that whoever wins the presidential election will have a new presidential seal.

Donald Trump gave a speech to the Conservative group Turning Point USA on Tuesday in front of

what appeared to be the presidential seal, but it turned out was a, well, I don't know, an alternative, a fake, a prototype, an updating.

Who knows what this will prove to be?

There were certain key changes to it.

The American eagle had been turned into a two-headed Russian eagle.

The 13 arrows held by the eagle in the presidential seal turned into 13 golf clubs, the olive branch into a wad of cash, and the words a pluribus unum out of many, one in Latin had been turned into 45 is a puppet in Spanish.

Now, I mean, people have assumed this was some kind of prank or a joke.

Is it not just America updating its iconography to better reflect what it is as a nation today?

I thought there was interesting coverage from The Guardian on this.

It said, in other words, a proud presidential symbol was apparently reworked to shame Trump over two of the biggest targets of anti-Trump criticism, Russian involvement in the 2016 election and excessive golfing.

Is that really one of the biggest elements of the anti-Trump criticism?

Excessive golfing?

I'm kind of ambifling with the golfing thing compared to putting children in cages.

Reminds me of the two biggest targets of anti-Hitler criticism, the Holocaust, and the fact he didn't get enough protein.

Well, I mean, the thing with, I mean, I go a different way on the golf.

I think that's the best thing Trump has done.

Imagine if all that time he'd spent playing golf, he'd spent doing presidential stuff.

Oh, God.

The world would, I mean, I think it would probably have just cracked open by now.

I think, if anything, he has played significantly insufficient quantities of golf.

Not enough.

But I think this is a great...

new insignia for America, a two-faced Russian predator and a sport traditionally the preserve of conservative white men.

How better could you express what America is about?

Heat wave news now, and well, the big news here, apart from

the new Prime Minister, is,

well, apparently, we're being punished for choosing a new Prime Minister with an absolutely appalling heat wave.

Britain and indeed Europe, if that still exists, indeed, now Boris is Prime Minister, I think it's been officially cancelled, have been suffering or enjoying record high temperatures, depending on your view of heat.

Record temperatures set in Belgium, Germany, the Netherlands, also in Paris.

Still think you can get by without the cooling influence of Britain after everything we've done for you.

I'm getting confused.

Britain had its second hottest day ever

and the hottest ever day, in fact, inside my head as I pondered the implications of a Johnson government.

And how the hell I'm going to attempt to explain the last 10 years to my friend Frozen Errol, who cryonically froze himself in 2010 because he couldn't wait to see what the world was like in 2020.

It's going to be tough.

It's going to be very tough.

Was he called Frozen Errol before he froze himself?

Always.

It's a weird guy, that one.

And just the 10 years.

It's so odd.

It was hot.

It was hot in London this week, Andy.

It was hot.

It was so hot.

How hot was it, Som?

It was so hot.

The London Eye was wearing sunglasses.

It was so hot, Andy.

Right.

How hot?

Thank you.

It was so hot on the Jack the Ripper tour, they said, you know, the real killer is this bloomin' eat, innit?

Gosh, it was so hot this week, Andy.

How hot?

It was so hot, even English people were saying, this beer is too warm.

It was so hot.

How hot?

It was so hot.

Hampstead Heath was declared the world's first outdoor gay sauna.

It was so hot.

Precisely how hot?

It was so hot.

Even Andy Zaltzmann's comedy was considered to be on fire.

Wow.

That's how hot it was.

That's many hideous.

I mean, the rest I could take, but they just tipped over the edge into

just outright outright nonsense.

It was I mean just unpleasantly hot the World Meteorological Organization a spokesman from there said these extreme events are becoming more frequent they're starting earlier and they're becoming more intense and it's a problem that is not going to go away which is disappointing for me and I don't think we should rule it out.

It just disappearing despite all the scientific evidence and people

climate is it climate change or is it just a free market at work?

You know, because five hottest summers in history, well, five hottest summers since the year 1500 have all occurred this century.

2002, 2003, 2010, 2016, 2018, 2019 look set to join it.

Is it not just years setting an example and other years raising their game

to meet it?

Does it not just show that the result of the Cold War was entirely correct?

NATO.

Unfortunately, though, you don't have to deal with humidity, right?

It's just a pure racist heat, is what you have there.

Yeah, basically, just that.

Caused a lot of trouble for the trains.

There was transport chaos all around London with the heat.

It got so bad, East Midlands trains advised passengers not to travel, which, you know, that's really all passengers want to do, Andy.

If passengers aren't traveling, they just stay.

Yeah.

To be honest, I mean, that's just generally good advice on most trains in this country.

Don't travel.

Don't travel.

Well, travel broadens the mind, doesn't it?

And

that can only lead to disappointment.

Now, in Australia, 82% of homes have air conditioning.

In the UK, it's just 3% of homes have air conditioning, and 100% of UK homes have the shittest showers on the face of the planet.

I tried to have a cold shower to cool down this week.

It was like being urinated on by a baby with kidney failure.

It was nothing.

You guys have got to sort that out, please.

Projectiles news now, and well people have spent probably a lot of this week throwing things at things in the privacy of their own home.

Certainly I've been doing that and my television is heavily bruised.

And we all have a projectile.

Australia,

Tom, has

been

cheekily,

shall we say, exporting some of its projectile flinging systems to the UAE.

Yes, selling weapon systems directly to the UAE's armed forces, an army that is currently liberating the absolute shit out of Yemen right now.

And this is great news for Australia.

Who says we don't play an important role in global events, Andy?

We're a real country.

We're not just an episode of The Simpsons, okay?

Yeah.

Well, it's good.

Think like a superpower, act like a superpower.

I think so.

And up until now, Australia's arms trade has only consisted of making boomerangs and informing people what does and doesn't constitute a knife.

So this is a big step up for us, and we're quite happy with it.

The remote weapons system is a collection of sensors and a swiveling mount set around a small cannon, heavy machine gun, or missile launcher, ages four and up.

It comes from a company based in Canberra called Electro-Optic Systems, which really makes them sound like they make robotic eyes for people who have lost their eyes, as opposed to a company that makes things blow you up into tiny pieces the size of eyes.

So it's a little bit misleading there.

But it had already been revealed that this company was selling weapon systems to the UAE, but, quote, the company had repeatedly declined to say if they were selling to military or civilian customers, which seems like an odd distinction.

If you're buying your weapon systems attached to a small cannon, heavy machine gun or missile launcher, are you really still a civilian?

I think you've crossed over.

How civil are you going to be?

Boy, you could do it as a hobby, can't you?

Hobbyists are key market these days for arms exporters.

It's for duck honey.

In other projectiles news,

we,

well, as a planet, we narrowly avoided getting absolutely hammered by an asteroid.

100 meters in diameter, clocking 24 kilometers a second, missed the Earth by just 70,000 kilometers.

And to give you some idea of how close that is,

that's more than 10 kilometers,

but less than a million.

It was

between 57 and 130 meters.

Almost on holidays, everyone.

Almost there.

It was between 57 and 130 meters across the asteroid.

Could have had someone's eye out or destroyed the planet or somewhere in between.

Described as a city killer asteroid.

But so small it was very hard to see.

No sense of fair play.

Oh, there is there.

From the universe.

Also, some dispute over what asteroids are specifically.

Current scientific thought is they are crumbs left over from God's rapidly eaten sandwich at lunch on day six of his, with hindsight, seriously overhasty universe creation project that gained him so many fans back in the day.

Yeah, yeah.

So if the asteroid hit the Earth, scientists projected the impact would be equivalent to 30 atomic bombs, and they named the asteroid asteroid 2019 OK.

Just to give you a sense, if you're not a scientist, NASA uses OK as a technical unit of measurement of how f ⁇ we would be if the asteroid hit us.

So, for

OK is bigger than a smaller asteroid that would be at the

level of impact, and a bigger asteroid would be, ah, oh shit, Black Jesus, hold me, please, not in the face, Mr.

Asteroid, please.

That's the NASA ranking of asteroids.

I was trying to get my head around like how big it is because it said 100 meters and that's metric, and you know, I'm an American and I understand that.

So I was trying to figure out the conversions.

And a hundred meter asteroid is about the size of a 30-story building or your average Hilton hotel.

So the asteroid hitting the Earth would have the destructive power of dropping an entire Hilton on your city from a great height, which makes sense that they called it a city killer because multinational corporations catering to the whims of the rich are destroying urban life.

And if the asteroid did hit, it would also charge you $35 for a 10-ounce beer from the mini bar.

So, but I don't think it's all bad.

Like, we all know how serious an asteroid strike could be based on the 1998 documentary Deep Impact,

where we learned that an asteroid strike would wipe out coastal cities, but we would end up with Morgan Freeman as president.

And I think that's worth some serious consideration.

The asteroid eluded detection because it came directly from the sun, and so it wasn't picked up on until the last moment, which is exactly the same ingenious maneuver that Daenerys Targaryen used in the final season of Game of Thrones to hide her dragons in the sun to get the jump on Euron Greyjoy and avoid his dragon-slaying crossbows.

So the asteroid enjoyed the last season of Game of Thrones.

So, what are you nerds complaining about?

I believe the US has already blamed Iran for the asteroid,

which seems a little unfair to me.

Apparently, it was planning on hitting the Earth, but then saw Boris Johnson becoming PM and going, whoa,

don't want to get involved.

Dodge that bullet.

But rumor has it that waiting for another similar asteroid to actually hit the Earth and wipe out the entire population of Ireland is Boris's favoured plan to resolve the issue with the Irish border, which does seem more likely than sorting out the backstop situation.

Well, that brings us to the end of

this bugle.

I hope we've covered every story that you wanted to hear this week.

And if not, just make some up of your own.

In the blank bit of the bugle that we mentioned earlier, I'm just going to leave.

We're going to leave 15 seconds of silence now for you to do some of your own bugle for once.

Is that 15 yet?

How much longer do I need to leave?

Another couple.

There, stop.

Right.

There we go.

I hope you fill that with some absolute gold.

Thank you very much for listening.

The bugle will be off for the next couple of weeks.

We will put out some sub-bugles in the meantime.

Then we'll be back with the live shows from the Edinburgh Festival on the 16th of August and the 19th of August.

You're doing the 19th, I think, aren't you, Tom?

I sure am.

Yes.

With Alice, and Nish is doing the 16th with TBC.

I love their stuff.

They're great.

They popped up a a few times in today's script actually i think tv too

uh don't forget to come and see the edinburgh shows of all the bugle co-hosts uh who will be there tom plug your show i'll bloody be there i'm doing a show called enough every night of the fringe at the monkey barrel at 9 p.m i will be doing um satirist for hire at the stand at 4 p.m i think

i still can't remember what it is um i've had a busy summer and i'm very tired busy summer you've been sitting around all day watching cricket lately.

I've been watching it in a busy way.

Oh, God.

From the 13th to the 25th.

Let's go with that, roughly.

That's ballpark it.

Political Animal will be on most nights at the stand from the 13th until I think the 22nd.

And so there's those two live bugle shows.

I mean, the thing is, the key to selling your show in Edinburgh is to make people think that they have to do a little bit of work themselves to find out when it's on.

You don't want to put it all on a plate.

4.30, you're up.

Get them actively...

Ready?

Oh, that's later than I was expecting.

Send your satirical requests to satirize this at satiristforhire.com, and I will have them ready for 4 p.m.

every day, half an hour before showtime.

Very unlikely.

Fans, don't bet on it.

All right.

Do support all the Bugle co-hosts who will be there, including Tom.

NATO, any shows you'd like to plug for our listeners?

The main thing I want to plug, I want to make sure the Buglers know about my album.

I have a comedy album called The Whiteness Album

that is available wherever comedy can be streamed and downloaded.

And much cool.

I just published a story actually this week at therumpus.net.

The title of the story is Introducing La Moisha and Hezbollah Schoenfeld.

It's a funny and sad story about the decision to give my daughters my wife's last name and how my grandfather was angrier about that than he was about the Holocaust.

Thank you very much for listening.

Sorry if I've been slightly off my absolute peak form today.

You've been great, Eddie.

You're always on fire.

You're too kind.

Thanks, Tom.

Delightful, as always, to have you on the show.

And

enjoyed the time you've got before burning in the eternal fires of hell.

There it is.

NATO, thanks again.

Do come back on soon.

Buglers will be back with a full show in three weeks.

There will be two weeks of sub-Bugles to come.

And if you want to join the voluntary subscription scheme, go to thebuglepodcast.com and click donate.

And we will play you out, as always, with lies about some of our voluntary subscribers.

Alex Hoffman wishes eating carrots was considered as cool and seductive as smoking cigarettes used to be back in the 1950s.

Alex absolutely loves carrots.

Jonathan Monroe wrote a computer program that averaged out all recipes in the world to formulate one single dish.

The result, a little surprisingly, was a tin of spam inside a watermelon.

Thomas Teebalt wishes more trains went choo-choo instead of honk.

Not all progress is progress.

On reflection, Thomas wouldn't even mind if cars went choo-choo these days instead of room, each to their own.

Jack Horton thinks the world might be a happier, calmer place if everyone was legally obliged to spend 15 minutes every day sitting on a bench, thinking quietly to themselves and then making polite conversation for an additional five minutes with any passerby.

LF Turner is impressed by that idea and would add that people should donate all their spare chairs to a communal chair library so more people can spend more time sitting down and that some of those surplus chairs could even be bolted together to make benches for the bench scheme.

Belinda Copeland has analyzed all the how many questions posed by Bob Dylan, the renowned singer-songwriter and no-time chorister of the year, in his hit song Blowing in the Wind and has calculated that the average answer is 21.57.

This prompted Chris Norman to notice that that is also the test match bowling average of the great England cricketer Freddie Truman.

Could that be purely coincidence wonders Chris, those two giants of the 1960s unified by a number?

Yes, Chips enriched the Blue Bugle Easter, pointing out that in fact only 2.61% of coincidences have any real relevance.

But hang on, interrupts Amir Schemmer.

2.61 runs per over was Fred Truman's test match economy rate and it's hard to imagine the great Yorkshire fast bowler cropping up in two statistics to two decimal places without it proving the existence of some form of God.

Rich the Bugle Easter concedes this point and says that it proves that God probably loves cricket and might come from Leeds.

Here endeth the lies.

Amen.

Hi buglers, it's producer Chris here.

I just wanted to very quickly tell you about my new podcast Mildly Informed which is in podcast feeds and YouTube right now.

Quite simply, it's a show where me and my friend Richie review literally anything.

So please come join us wherever you get your podcasts right now.